Take Back Control: Admin Dashboard & Media Optimisation Are Now Generally Available

Admin Dashboard and Media Optimisation, two of the most anticipated features in Hyvä Commerce, have moved from beta to general availability. After months of real-world testing and further enhancements, both are ready for production. Whether you manage a single storefront or a wide multi-store operation, these releases are worth your attention.

Hyvä Commerce: Built for the Whole Storefront

Hyvä Commerce delivers improvements across every layer of your Magento store: Theme, Checkout, Admin Theme, CMS, Image Editor, and more. Admin Dashboard and Media Optimisation are the newest additions, bringing real-time admin insights and automatic image optimisation into the core suite.

The Problem: What Merchants Were Living With

An Admin That Told You Nothing

If you have spent any time in Magento's admin panel, you will know the feeling. You log in, land on the default dashboard, and are greeted by a limited number of generic charts and summary tiles that probably have nothing to do with what you need right now. The dashboard has long been one of the most underutilised screens in the entire platform. A wasted opportunity to surface meaningful data at a glance.

Worse still, every admin user, whether a marketing manager checking campaign performance, a site reliability engineer eyeing Core Web Vitals, or a customer service lead tracking recent orders, landed on the exact same screen. There was no personalisation, no relevance, and no control. You either hunted through reports or built workarounds outside the admin entirely.

Images: The Silent Performance Killer

On the storefront side, unoptimised imagery has been quietly dragging performance scores down for years. Merchants upload product photos, category banners, and CMS content in whatever format and resolution they have to hand, often large JPEGs or PNGs running into several megabytes. Without an automated optimisation layer, those files land on the frontend exactly as uploaded.

The consequences are tangible: slower page loads, worse Core Web Vitals scores, and ultimately, lost conversions. Solving this typically meant paying for third-party image CDN services, configuring external tooling, or relying on developers to write bespoke scripts - none of which is sustainable at scale.

Two Features, One Goal: Giving Merchants More Control

Before we go deeper, here is a quick summary of what each feature delivers:

• Admin Dashboard: A fully customisable, widget-based dashboard that puts the right information in front of the right people: per user, per storefront, in real time.
• Media Optimisation: Automatic image conversion and resizing across your entire storefront, converting files to WebP and AVIF formats so oversized images never reach the frontend again.

Both are built with the same Hyvä philosophy: easy for merchants to use, easy for developers to extend.

Now, let us start where merchants will feel the impact most immediately.

Admin Dashboard: Your Dashboard, Your Rules

The Admin Dashboard is a complete revitalisation of Magento's admin landing page. For the first time, it gives every admin user meaningful control over what they see — and ensures that what they see is actually useful.

Individuality and Relevance, Built In

Dashboard configuration is per user. Log in as a sales manager and build a view centred around sales funnels and order volumes. Log in as a technical lead and surface Core Web Vitals data and performance metrics. Each admin user builds and maintains their own dashboard independently — no more one-size-fits-all.

Users can add, configure, remove, reorder, and resize widgets with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Widgets can be duplicated, expanded to full screen, and filtered by name or type to make discovery quick. The experience is intentionally straightforward: if you can use a browser, you can build your dashboard.

Multi-Storefront, All in One View

One of the standout capabilities is the ability to display and configure widgets for multiple storefronts simultaneously — without having to switch scope. If you manage three stores, you can compare their sales data, funnel activity, and performance metrics side by side in a single view. For multi-store operators, this alone is a significant time-saver.

Widgets That Matter

The initial release ships with a purposeful set of widgets covering the metrics merchants actually care about:

• Google CrUX (Core Web Vitals): View performance data for a specified storefront in an at-a-glance graph.
• Sales Funnel Activity: Track active carts, in-progress checkouts, and completed orders over a defined time period.
• Order Volume: Monitor the number of orders over time to spot trends and anomalies.
• Orders by Country: Understand where orders are being placed from and shipped to.
• Recent Orders: A live list linking directly to your most recent orders.
• Average Order Value: See the average spend over time filtered by order status.
• Sales Figures: Keep track of order totals, including tax and shipping, for a given time period.
• New Customers: View all recently registered customers with the total and average order spend.
• Search Terms: Track the most recent and top search items on your storefront.
• Best Selling Products: Get a quick overview of your top-performing products
• Most Viewed Products: See which products are getting the most traffic.
• Launchpad: Create quick links to your most used areas of the admin panel.
• Checklist: Create and manage to-dos without ever leaving the admin panel.
• Links & Text: Simple widgets for pinning useful links or writing notes — ideal for team communications.
• Hyvä CMS Scheduled Releases: Get an overview of all your recent and upcoming scheduled Hyvä CMS campaigns.

The widget library is growing. For the complete and up-to-date list, refer to the Hyvä Commerce widget list.

Existing Customisations Stay Put

If your admin panel already has custom content or existing dashboard modifications, there is nothing to unpick. The new dashboard framework is designed to coexist with pre-existing customisations — your team will not lose anything they have built. Both the new dashboard and the default Magento dashboard can be enabled or disabled independently via configuration.

For Developers: Easy to Extend

The Admin Dashboard is built on a developer-friendly framework that makes it straightforward to create new widgets using multiple predefined data types. Adding multi-store support to custom widgets is equally simple. Developers can define custom widget sizes via configuration and add tags to improve discoverability. For technical details, refer to the Admin Dashboard developer documentation.

The Merchant Takeaway

Your admin dashboard should work for you — not the other way around. For the first time, every admin user can build a view that reflects exactly what they need to see, without writing a line of code or waiting on a developer. It is the control merchants have always deserved. The widget library is growing, with more on the way check the Roadmap!

Media Optimisation: Set It, Forget It, Perform Better

Media Optimisation takes an automatic approach to one of the most persistent performance challenges on Magento storefronts: oversized, unoptimised imagery. Once configured, it works silently in the background, converting, resizing, and serving images in modern formatsso your team never has to think about it again.

Automatic Image Replacement Across the Entire Storefront

The feature scans all storefront HTML output for images and optimises them on the fly. This covers legacy content too: Page Builder blocks, CMS pages, and category images as well as all Hyvä CMS content and media gallery images. Coverage is comprehensive by design.

Images are automatically converted to WebP or AVIF — two modern formats with excellent browser support and significantly smaller file sizes. WebP compresses images by an average of 35%; AVIF achieves around 50%. For browsers that do not support these formats, a fallback to the original image is provided automatically, so nothing breaks.

Right-Sized for Every Screen 

Images are resized across three admin-configurable dimensions. The browser selects the most appropriate size for the current viewport, ensuring that mobile visitors are not downloading desktop-scale images. This is the kind of detail that meaningfully improves both performance scores and data usage for customers on mobile connections.

The reduction in file size can be dramatic. Images that originally weighed several megabytes can be served at under 100KB. That is a reduction that shows up immediately in your PageSpeed or Lighthouse scores and will positively impact your Core Web Vitals.

Animated GIF Support

GIFs are not left behind. Media Optimisation supports animated GIFs, converting them to animated WebP — maintaining the motion while delivering a fraction of the file size. If your storefront uses animated imagery for product demonstrations or promotional banners, this support is particularly welcome.

Integrated With Hyvä CMS and the Wider Storefront

Media Optimisation is fully integrated with Hyvä CMS, catalogue imagery, and the media gallery. Every image output through these channels is handled automatically. It also co-exists with major CDN providers, so merchants already using a CDN can continue to do so — with the added flexibility to disable on-site optimisations in favour of CDN-side processing if preferred.

No External Tools Required

Critically, Media Optimisation requires no external services or subscriptions. Everything is handled within Hyvä Commerce itself. For merchants who have historically relied on paid image CDN services purely for optimisation, this represents a meaningful cost saving without any compromise on quality.

For Developers: Full API and CLI Tools

The developer experience has had the same attention.A full API enables in-depth integrations — including use with Hyvä CMS and the upcoming PDP gallery. Configuration options are extensive: you can define image formats, sizes, engine selection, and quality settings. A helpful overview of the current server configuration is available directly within the admin, making it easy to understand exactly what the environment supports.

For bulk operations, Media Optimisation includes CLI tools for batch converting and resizing existing images — ideal for migrating an established catalogue to optimised formats from the outset.

The Merchant Takeaway

Slow storefronts cost sales. Media Optimisation removes one of the most common causes of poor performance — unoptimised imagery — without any ongoing effort from your team. Upload images as normal; Hyvä Commerce handles the rest.

New functionalities for this feature are on the way check the Roadmap!

What This Means for Your Store

Both features reflect something important about the direction of Hyvä Commerce respects merchants' time and gives them the tools to operate more effectively — without requiring constant developer intervention or third-party solutions.

The Admin Dashboard puts relevant, real-time information in front of the right people. The Media Optimisation layer ensures your storefront is always serving images in the best possible format and size. Together, they address two areas that have long been sources of frustration and wasted resources.

Both features are available now as part of Hyvä Commerce 1.2.0, along with Hyvä CMS, Image Editor, and our refreshed Admin Theme. If you are already running Commerce, the upgrade path is straightforward. If you have been evaluating Hyvä Commerce, these additions make a compelling case for taking the next step.

For full documentation, widget references, installation and configuration guides, visit the Hyvä Commerce documentation.

A Hyvä Commerce license costs 3,000 EUR per year, valid for a single Magento 2 installation across unlimited domains and storeviews.

Everything you need in one place:

• Hyvä Theme, Hyvä UI, and Hyvä Checkout included.

• New Hyvä CMS for easier content management.

• Admin Image Editor and Admin Theme for a better backend experience.